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By Jonathan P. Caulkins, Angela Hawken, and Mark A.R. Kleiman

As officials in Washington State and Colorado try to decide how to implement the marijuana-legalization laws passed by their voters last month, officials in Washington, DC, are trying to figure out how to respond. Below, a quick guide to what’s at stake.

WHAT DO THE WASHINGTON AND COLORADO LAWS SAY?

Lots of crucial details remain to be determined, but in outline:

In both states, adults may — according to state but not federal law — possess limited amounts of marijuana, effective immediately.

In both states, there are to be licensed (and taxed) growers and sellers, under rules to take effect later this year.

Sales to minors and possession by minors remain illegal.

Colorado, but not Washington, now allows anyone person over the age of 21 to grow up to six marijuana plants (no more than three of them in the flowering stage) in any “enclosed, locked space,” and to store the marijuana so produced at the growing location. That marijuana can be given away (up to an ounce at a time), but not sold.

HOW MUCH OF THIS CAN THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT PREVENT?

Paradoxically, the regulated activity permitted by these laws is easy to stop, but the unregulated activity is hard to stop.

Although everything allowed by the new state laws remains forbidden by federal law, if thousands of Coloradans start growing six pot plants each in their basements there wouldn’t be enough DEA agents to ferret them out. The same applies to possession for personal use.

On the other hand, the federal government has ample legal authority to shut down the proposed systems of state-licensed production and sale. Once someone formally applies to Colorado or Washington for permission to commit what remains a federal felony, a federal court can enjoin that person from doing any such thing, and such orders are easily enforced. So the federal government could make it impossible to act as a licensed grower or seller in either state.

Moreover, it could do so at any time. The lists of license-holders will always be available, and at any point they could be enjoined from continuing to act under those licenses. That creates a “wait-and-see” option unusual in law enforcement situations; in general, an illicit activity becomes harder to suppress the larger it is and the longer it has been established.

WHAT IMPACT WILL THE LAWS HAVE ON DRUG ABUSE?

It is possible that removing the state-level legal liability for possession and use of marijuana will increase demand, but there is little historical evidence from other jurisdictions that changing user penalties much affects consumption patterns.

There is no historical evidence concerning how legal production and sale might influence consumption, for the simple reason that no modern jurisdiction has ever allowed large-scale commercial production. But commercialization might matter more than mere legality of use. It could affect consumption by making drugs easier to get, by making them cheaper, by improving quality and reliability as perceived by consumers, and by changing attitudes: both consumer attitudes toward the drugs and the attitudes of others about those who use drugs. How great the impacts would be remains to be seen; it would depend in part on yet-to-be-determined details of the Colorado and Washington systems.

Washington’s legislation is designed to keep the price of legally-sold marijuana about the same as the current price of illegal marijuana. Colorado’s system might allow substantially lower prices. Falling prices would be expected to have a significant impact on consumption, especially among very heavy users and users with limited disposable income: the poor and the young.

WHAT EFFECT WILL THE LAWS HAVE ON DRUG TRAFFICKING?

If the laws affect Mexican drug trafficking organizations at all, the impact will be to deprive them of some, but not the bulk, of their revenues. Transnational drug trafficking organizations currently profiting from smuggling marijuana into the US or organizing its production here cannot gain from increased competition.

The open question is how much, if any, revenue they would lose from either falling prices or reduced market share. The oft-cited figure that the big Mexican drug trafficking groups derive 60% of their drug-export revenue from marijuana trafficking has been thoroughly debunked; the true figure is closer to 25%, and that doesn’t count their ill-gotten gains from domestic Mexican drug dealing or from extortion, kidnapping, and theft. So don’t expect Los Zetas to go out of business, whatever happens in Colorado.

Legal marijuana in Washington State is likely to be too expensive to compete on the national market. But prices in Colorado might be low enough to make legal cannabis from Colorado retailers competitive with illicit sellers of wholesale cannabis as a supply for marijuana dealers in other states. To take advantage of that opportunity, out-of-state dealers could organize groups of “smurfs” to buy one ounce each at multiple retail outlets; a provision of the Colorado law forbids the state from collecting the sort of information about buyers that might discourage smurfing. Marijuana prices might fall substantially nationwide, with harmful impacts on drug abuse but beneficial impacts on international trafficking. (The state government could even gain revenue if Colorado became a national source of marijuana.)

The other wild card in the deck is the Colorado “home-grow” provision. Marijuana producers in Colorado will be able to grow the plant without any risk of enforcement action by the state, and also without any registration requirement or taxation, as long as they grow no more than three flowering plants and three plants not yet in flower at any given location. By developing networks of grow locations each below the legal limit, entrepreneurs could create large-scale production operations with a significant cost advantage over states where growing must be concealed from state and local law enforcement agencies.

Only time will tell whether Colorado “home-grown” could compete with California and Canada in the national and international market for high-potency cannabis or with Mexico in the market for “commercial-grade” cannabis. But the risks imposed by local law enforcement, and the costs of concealment to avoid those risks, constitute such a large share of the costs of illegal marijuana growing that avoiding those costs would constitute a very great competitive advantage, and illicit enterprise has proven highly adaptable to changing conditions.

IS THERE A BASIS FOR A BARGAIN?

Maybe. Federal and state authorities share an interest in preventing the development of large interstate sales from Colorado and Washington, and the whole country might gain from learning about the experience of legalization in those two states: as long as the effects of those laws could be mostly contained within those states. The question is whether the federal government might be willing to let Colorado and Washington try allowing in-state sales while working hard to prevent exports, and whether those states, with federal help (and the threat of a federal crackdown on their licensed growers and sellers if Washington and Colorado product started to show up in New York and Texas), could succeed in doing so. If that happens, it would be vital to have mechanisms in place to learn as much as possible from the experiment.

Things will get even more complex if other states decide to join the party.

So buckle your seat belts; this could be a rather bumpy ride.

Mark A.R. Kleiman, Jonathan P. Caulkins, and Angela Hawken are the authors of Drugs and Drug Policy: What Everyone Needs to Know. Mark A.R. Kleiman is Professor of Public Policy at UCLA, editor of The Journal of Drug Policy Analysis, and author of When Brute Force Fails and Against Excess. Jonathan P. Caulkins is Stever Professor of Operations Research and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University. Angela Hawken is Associate Professor of Public Policy at Pepperdine University.

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The two characters that my high school readers wanted MORE written about are here! I did a happy dance about reviewing the continuing saga of Ben and Colleen and their roller coaster relationship. When we left the two in Stoner and Spaz, Colleen had returned to her life of addiction. Now she has returned to Ben, to the chagrin of Ben’s grandmother who is excited to have him pursue his film career and the cultured life. Colleen leaves, returns, leaves, returns, moves in, for a short time. Can she be trusted to make a new life for herself? If the ending scene is any indication, my YAs will be happy. This is such a great book for character studies. I will encourage teachers to use it in the classroom.

Because I worry as a part time job, I have been reading about a new pastime among teenagers. It's called a pharm party. The basic idea behind it is to swipe a bunch of leftover prescription pills from the medicine cabinet, get a group of kids (usually eighth grade and above) who also bring swiped prescription meds, then open the capsules, smash the tablets, and mix everything into a big hodgepodge that is sniffed, snorted or swallowed. The psychoactive swap can be anything from antibiotics to blood pressure meds. The drugs of choice, or so it's rumored, are pain killers.

Now, I am still stumped by the thought of cutting parties. So when I read about these parties, I marched straight into my boys' room with the paper. They were sprawled on the sofa, texting while blank homework worksheets littered the floor. This is how it went:

Son 1: "Hey Mom, why do you look so worried? And do we have any ham left?"

Son 2: "The rest of the pizza rolls are mine. Don't touch them."

Mom explains about pharm parties. The boys laugh.

Son 2: "That's ridiculous. No one does that. You would get so messed up."

Son 1: "You should stop reading so much. So can you make me a sandwich?"

So, in my usual relentless manner, I asked the kids I worked with, both first year college students and high school students, if they had heard of pharm parties. They shrugged. None of them knew anyone who had ever participated in one, yet this is all over the media. And everyone knew what I meant immediately(except my two sons). When all else failed, I turned to that mecca of youth culture communication: I asked Son No. 2 to do a pharm party search on myspace.

Now, I do know that the kids there will post just about anything, and very little showed up about pharm parties. It seems this idea was first reported by the (National)Center for Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA). Then it was on a few of the daytime talk shows, but apparently, and thankfully, the pharm party is largely a mythical creation of the media. Sure, kids probably get together and barter some of the drugs in the medicine cabinet, but the implication out there is that this is an organized, widespread ritual of drug abuse that is happening inside the lovely homes on your street.

You would think they would NOT, as you say "just randomly swallow anything put before them." I'm so glad to hear this seems to be mainly rumor. And yet . . . I can almost buy it. What I really don't get is cutting.

How glad I am to know that this is mainly myth! This almost disturbs me more than the cutting, which disturbs me a great deal. At least the cutting will only leave physical scars; this could kill kids or damage them psychically for life. I asked my kids about this and they all three stared at me, aghast. "What? That could KILL you!" Whew.

I know what you mean, Marcia. I first heard this on the Keith Ablow show (that show might not even be aired anymore), and he had two kids on who frequented these parties. I remember thinking how itsounded like something teens might do -- but I didn't hear of it happening around here.

I am so relieved that this has been media-fueled.

And cutting...I know. It just puzzles me as to how "it relieves the stress of my life," as one teen girl put it. That, unfortunately, is spreading.

This story takes place in London in the early 1800s. Ivy's family is poor and makes it's living in dishonest ways. When she is little, she is taken away from her family by Carroty Kate, a woman who comes from a gang of criminals worse than her own family. They use her to help them rob people, particularly other children. When Kate dies, Ivy ends up back with her family again. Ivy ends up as an artists model for a rich artist but his mother hates her immediately and does everything she can to be rid if her. Ivy has a problem with laudanum, which is a liquid that was put into water and would put a person to sleep. It's a drug that could easily kill a person if taken improperly.

There were aspects of the story that didn't make sense to me, which I won't write about here because I don't want to give away anything about the plot or characters. Certain things that were in the book didn't add to the story at all and left me wondering why they were in there at all. This book won't disappoint fans of historical fiction, but other readers might not find much to like about it.

This illustration is from my Senior Exhibition show where I illustrated a series of 6 Word Stories (originally appearing in the November 2006 issue of WIRED Magazine.) The show actually opens today at 5:00pm but all of the work is up on my site now. And I have a lengthy explanation of the whole project on my blog. If you happen to be in the Milwaukee area tonight with nothing better to do, come by and say hello!

I'm afraid I'm in the same boat as most people here it seems. I'd like to post more but I'm in a bit of a busy period as I ramp up to my big show. For now, enjoy a slightly older illustration featuring Kirby from "Kirby's Dream Land" fame. Until next time.

I suppose I'm the new kid on the block. Hi, I'm Josh. I'm from Milwaukee, where I'm really just getting started with this whole "drawing for a living" thing. I'm really looking forward to getting to know you guys (there's some really fantastic/intimidating stuff!) and getting some fresh feedback on my work. If you have a moment, mosey on over to my website (joshwebbillustration.com) as I'd love to know what you think.

Tnanks! The illustration is part of my senior thesis project where I'm illustrating a bunch of very short stories (you may have seen them published in Wired last november.) This one is "We kissed, she melted, mop please!" by James Patrick Kelly.